OF STUDYING LANGUAGES I. FRENCH CONTAINING A COMPLETE ACCIDENCE AND BY G. EUGÈNE-FASNACHT SENIOR MASTER OF MODERN LANGUAGES, HARPUR TRUST MODERN SCHOOL, BEDFORD OF THE PROGRESSIVE FRENCH AND GERMAN COURSE, ETC. SELTOTHECA APR 1882 CODLEIANA London MACMILLAN AND CO. 1881 The right of adapting this Method to the Study of other Languages is Reserved PREFACE. THIS method is based on the axiom that the theoretical study of a science can only be carried on satisfactorily if the student possesses a sufficient amount of knowledge gained by experience; and conversely, that knowledge gained by experience, in order to be complete and thorough, must be supplemented by a systematic analysis of the laws which underlie that science.1 Taking this general principle for my starting-point, and applying it to the study of languages in particular, I have attempted to initiate the beginner into the study of languages (in the first instance the French language), by a method in which practice and theory are so intimately blended, as continually to react upon and supplement each other. With this view I begin with whole sentences, instead of isolated words, and taking the Verb for the warp of the texture, I gradually interweave the woof in the shape of Nouns, Pronouns, Adjectives, and other parts of speech, until finally the complete fabric emerges from the loom. Reserving any further ornamental embroidery for a more advanced stage, I have confined my task to the framing of a plain, homespun, wear-and-tear-proof fabric, of which not a single thread need subsequently be undone. In a certain degree, I am fully aware, the working of this plan has been more or less successfully attempted before; with this fundamental difference, however, between the traditional type of Grammars and the Organic Method, that in the former the Syntax is either entirely severed from, or at best placed "What the pupil should be taught is to methodise his knowledge, to look at every separate part of it in its relations to the other parts and the whole, combining the partial glimpses which he has obtained into a general map, if I may so speak."-JOHN STUART MILL. 2 "As we do not think in words but in sentences, and as language is the expression and embodiment of thought, it is clear that the unit of language must be the sentence and not the word. The words which compose a sentence are related to one another in the same way as the several elements of an idea or of an action as reproduced in thought, and can only be decomposed and separated by conscious analysis."-WAITZ, Anthropology. |